SOMETIME AROUND 2012, Chip Thomas, a family physician with a practice on the Navajo Nation, began seeing an uptick in certain health issues in Indigenous men in their seventies and eighties who had worked in uranium mines during the Cold War. A legacy of disease, environmental contamination, and preventable death has plagued Indian Country since mining operations for radioactive uranium ore—used for weapons and to meet the United States’ energy needs—began to proliferate during the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
The Cold War is over, but its aftermath continues to haunt the Diné people. They have been inordinately affected by the mining industry and the U.S. government’s failure to address inadequate regulations and disclose the dangers of working in the uranium mines. Thomas was seeing an increase in the number of local patients with lung cancer and other respiratory diseases—numbers reported at higher rates than the rest of the U.S. population.
“They would have to come in every six months for an evaluation to determine if they were still sick enough to continue receiving benefits from the Department of Labor,” Thomas says. “It was really their personal testimonies about their experiences that sensitized me to this issue. In that regard, I became more concerned about the use of nuclear weapons, nuclear power.”
"Stephanie on Jr’s House."
Photograph courtesy of Chip Thomas.
As a street artist, activist, and photographer, Thomas goes by the moniker jetsonorama. Since 2009, he’s been known for his large-scale wheatpasted images of Diné people, which are placed in public spaces throughout the reservation and serve to honor the people who have embraced the Black doctor from the East Coast for more than three decades. His work is a reminder that, for those who live there, Navajo land—or Dinétah—is more than a place of exploitable resources. It’s a sovereign nation.
As a 2024 visiting artist at the Albuquerque Museum, jetsonorama has installed two large-scale wheatpasted images in the museum’s lobby, on display through April 6, 2025. The diptych, titled panaceas, promises + problems, depicts Diné rancher Criagen Jordan Jr. on horseback on one side. On the other, Cyndy John Begaye holds a photo of her uranium-miner father. The images are a preview of Thomas’s work in the Albuquerque Museum’s exhibition Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, opening September 7. The show draws from interviews conducted by artist Ginger Dunnill for her ongoing Broken Boxes podcast, which she started in 2014 to amplify voices of underrepresented and visionary artists from BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities.
"Rose Hurley with Her Great Grandson."
Photograph courtesy of Chip Thomas.
Thomas’s work took on a new dimension this year with the reopening of the long-defunct Pinyon Plain Mine, located near the Grand Canyon’s South Rim in Arizona. Soaring uranium prices have prompted several mines in the West to restart or increase operations. Looking closely at the photo murals in the museum’s lobby, one is struck by the flickers of light reflecting off small uranium glass beads that are carefully embedded in the mural’s surface.
“The over 500 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation are what’s being referenced with those beads,” says Thomas. He’s especially concerned about the risks to public health and safety in hauling mined uranium across the Navajo Nation. In July, Thomas began installing a photo mural on the Lena Wall at Lena and Second streets in Santa Fe. The wall is reserved for wheatpasted projects curated by Santa Fe–based artist Matthew Chase-Daniel.
“He’s installing a big piece about the disconnect between the promise of nuclear energy and the bomb and the reality of the destructiveness of it for people, communities, and the environment,” says Chase-Daniel, who is half of the curatorial team that owns and operates Axle Contemporary mobile art gallery. “It will cover the whole side of the building and be up for about a year.”
Retired physician Chip Thomas creates art under the jetsonorama moniker.
Photograph courtesy of Jetsonorama.
THOMAS WAS BORN IN 1957 IN RALEIGH, North Carolina. In 1968, the height of the civil rights movement, he was in sixth grade. The public school system in Raleigh was being desegregated. “In my seventh-grade year,” he says, “I’d be bussed across town. But there was a lot of violence at the schools when kids got off the buses. My parents didn’t want me in that environment.”
So they sent Thomas to Arthur Morgan School, a progressive day and boarding school in the mountains of North Carolina. “The emphasis of the small Quaker setting was on the contributions of each person and on building community,” he says. “But it was also the first time I had an opportunity to go into a darkroom.”
In 1987, Thomas opened a small medical practice on the Navajo Nation, where he’d been since 1981, fulfilling the requirements of a National Health Service Corps scholarship by volunteering in an underserved community. His work afforded him the opportunity to build a darkroom and hone his skills as a photographer.
“That’s when I started taking it more seriously,” says Thomas, who would photograph community members and present them with a copy. “I was starting to get shows in different gallery spaces around the country. And the people who were pictured in the photos never got to see the images in their entirety. They never got to see the full show.”
The Albuquerque Museum lobby features a diptych of jetsonorama murals titled "panaceas, promises + problems."
Photograph courtesy of Albuquerque Museum.
Many of his subjects were patients at the clinic. “I’d approach them at the end of the visit about coming to visit them in their home to herd sheep with them, haul wood, whatever work they were doing around their ranches,” he recalls. “Slowly over time, I developed deeper relationships with people outside the clinic and was able to photograph them.”
The move from galleries to his signature large-scale murals was transformational, however, not just for his career but for his place on the Navajo Nation. “Doing the work in public really changed the nature of the conversation with the community. The nature of that conversation felt more open and honest,” he adds.
“I just appreciate his sense of place and that his photographs are of that community and for that community: pictures of children, Navajo elders,” Chase-Daniel says. “They feel like real celebrations of the communities he’s a part of.”
Chip Thomas installs one of his large-scale murals.
Photograph courtesy of Dawn Kish.
Work such as Stephanie on Jr’s House—which depicts a laughing Diné woman, her radiant face lifted toward the sky, and covers an entire exterior wall of a home near Tuba City, Arizona—is included in Broken Boxes. It typifies much of jetsonorama’s murals, which can be as large as 16 by 10 feet and sometimes nearly obliterate the structures that support them, their subjects commanding attention for their sheer size. They appear as features in the larger landscape of Dinétah, as Thomas juxtaposes people and locations, drawing parallels between the landscapes of human bodies and the environment that surrounds them.
“They function as integral components in the architectonics of the land and also stand as a call to visitors to pay attention,” writes Albuquerque Museum’s head curator Josie Lopez in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, co-authored with Dunnill and published by University of New Mexico Press. The exhibition features work from Thomas’s long-term project, Painted Desert, alongside other Broken Boxes podcast alumni, including contemporary Indigenous artists Raven Chacon, Sterlin Harjo, Marie Watt, and Cannupa Hanska Luger. “Employed primarily within the context of the Navajo Nation,” Lopez adds, “these murals are realized on a monumental scale and transform the landscape into spaces where the viewer is simultaneously confronted by and invited into the stories being told.”
"Cyndy Begaye" depicts her holding a photo of her father, Kee John, who died from radiation-exposure–related cancer.
Photograph courtesy of Chip Thomas.
TO APPRECIATE THE FULL CONTEXT IN WHICH Thomas works, it’s helpful to know how demographics inform his medium.
“The Navajo Nation is roughly 27,000 square miles in size, home to about 180,000 people, and has tremendous natural resources, including coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, and water in aquifers,” he says. “Yet at the time of my retirement, approximately 25 percent of my patients still didn’t have running water or electricity.
“In putting work up in the community, it was important to me to reflect back to the community the beauty that they shared with me,” he says about how the Painted Desert project both informed, and was informed by, his practice. “I was attempting to create an environment of wellness in the community that complemented the work I was doing in the clinic.”
Standing in front of the gleaming uranium beads in the Albuquerque Museum’s photo mural, any person can see that these glittering pieces represent invisible, toxic environmental threats—old and new, such as the Pinyon Plain Mine. While these dangers undermine the overall wellness of a people, the sheer size of this tribute to their humanity puts Diné people front and center among a larger nation that has often ignored their existence. They’re impossible to look away from.
Michael Abatemarco writes frequently on Indigenous art and photography and is an advocate for a nuclear-free world.
